Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  And yet Seward believed he saw a key irony in the outward symbols of British strength. Britain was becoming more and more like the United States, which he viewed as the prototype of middle-class society. Even as Seward strolled through the massive English country estates—with their wafting scents of honeysuckle and jasmine, their arching fountains, and their deer and pheasant wandering the grounds—he recognized that the common people would ultimately gain control of the nobility’s old treasures. “How distinctly I see the transition of society indicated in these massive, modern industrial structures, towering over the dilapidated walls of baronial castles,” he wrote home. “These immense estates must ultimately become prizes to the active and industrious classes.” The transition may be a “slow process,” but the “plebians wax stronger every day.” The overall dynamic, he observed, amounted to a “revolution” that would “assimilate them to us.” The “younger members of the family,” Seward declared, were “really its leaders.”55

  When he crossed the English Channel to France, Seward found that nation also vastly changed—but not in the same ways. The tiny, winding streets that he had observed in 1833 had been transformed into magnificent boulevards and sprawling gardens under the leadership of Napoleon III. And yet the same grand avenues were infused with a martial spirit he had not observed in Britain. The army, Seward noted, “is everywhere” in Paris. He was struck by the “egotism” of French nationalism. Still, the future secretary of state was ultimately impressed by the emperor when the two men met at Napoleon’s retreat in Compiègne. “It seemed difficult to find a subject on which we could differ, or which he did not discuss wisely,” Seward later recalled. The empress struck Lincoln’s future secretary of state as “graceful and pensively beautiful.”

  The contrasts among France, Britain, and the United States presented themselves even more sharply when he toured the Belgian battlefield at Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington’s armies had ultimately defeated Napoleon Bonaparte. As he stood on the same ground as the renowned generals, Seward found himself slightly conflicted. On the one hand, he admired Napoleon’s efforts to improve “the material and moral conditions” of his country. In retrospect, however, the French emperor’s reckless daring doomed him to defeat at the hands of his British adversary—that patient “nation of shopkeepers.”56

  The intersection of trade, commerce, and nationalism—all rising forces in the midnineteenth century—presented Seward with a fascinating puzzle. On the one hand, the industrial and market revolutions were clearly reshaping the world. At times, they seemed to promise closer ties among nations and growing harmony among men. At other moments, however, the same economic forces seemed to reinforce nationalism, adding fuel to new and ancient enmities. On board his steamer across the Atlantic, Seward listened as American residents boasted about “seizing and annexing Cuba.” On another occasion, a fight broke out among passengers—“coats stripped, knives drawn”—in the steerage compartment. It would be folly, Seward observed, to assume that economic progress necessarily marched hand in hand with peace. “When will war-making kings and emperors lack for armies to fight?” Seward asked. “Not in our day, I ween.”57

  Seward tried to find a middle path through this thicket. He worked ceaselessly to improve American trade and commerce. But he wanted to make sure that the fruits of economic development benefitted Americans—not “some foreign monopoly,” as he put it. “I can understand the proposition of free-trade,” Seward once acknowledged. “It is an intelligible theory, and at some future period down the vista of years, it is probable that the world will come to understand that universal free-trade is the wisest and most beneficent system of fiscal administration for any government and for all governments.” In his own time, Seward embraced selected reciprocal trade agreements. In the mid 1850s he voted for a major treaty that would lower tariffs with Canada. Yet Seward also believed that if the U.S. government did not intervene to protect American industries, young domestic manufacturers would find themselves overwhelmed by more powerful foreign competitors like Britain and France.58

  Lincoln shared Seward’s approach to trade. Like the New Yorker, Lincoln had long advocated material improvements—roads, canals, railroads—that would help get American products to world markets. Yet the New World would not win its independence from Europe simply by aping the Old World’s fashions and institutions. Lincoln liked to mock fellow citizens obsessed with “foreign luxuries—fine cloths, fine silks, rich wines, golden chains, and diamond rings.” He ridiculed those who felt the need to “strut in British cloaks.”59 Like Seward, Lincoln thought untrammeled free trade premature. America, Lincoln believed, would need to blaze its own path.

  The Terror of the World

  In the midnineteenth century, it was still considered poor form to actively seek the presidential nomination. So in the spring of 1860, when an acquaintance asked Lincoln about his thoughts on the upcoming race, the Illinoisan hesitated a little. Seward, the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination, could not win in a contest against Democrat Stephen Douglas, Lincoln told his correspondent. Then again, Lincoln admitted, his opinions were colored by his own ambitions. “The taste is in my mouth a little,” Lincoln confided, adding: “Let no eye but your own see this—not that there is anything wrong, or even ungenerous, in it; but it would be misconstrued.”60

  Like Lincoln’s past campaign against Douglas, in 1858, the current race was certain to address the central foreign-policy question of the day—namely, American expansion. The 1850s had witnessed the growth of a movement spearheaded by Douglas that sought to assert American power abroad. Calling itself Young America, it represented the latest evolution of the Manifest Destiny phenomenon of the Mexican War era. Young Americans shared the romantic spirit of the previous decade. They crowed about supporting fellow republicans abroad—and converting any autocratic holdouts. They believed that the United States was destined to become, as Douglas once put it, “the admiration and terror of the world.” They meant it in a good way.

  As Lincoln contemplated a presidential run, he took direct aim at the Democratic foreign-policy platform. At a speaking engagement in Springfield, he trotted out an old lecture, “Discoveries and Inventions,” in which he mocked Democrats, Douglas, and Young America.61 The speech, which Lincoln delivered on several occasions throughout the late 1850s, was not one of his most compelling efforts. Billy Herndon derided it as “a cold flat thing,” and it seemed to bore audiences. And yet, as a window onto Lincoln’s thinking about the intersection of commerce and foreign policy, it is a critical document. On this day, in April 1860, Lincoln’s audience included John Hay—the young Illinois native who, as secretary of state to presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, would ultimately carry a Hamiltonian approach to foreign policy into the Gilded Age.62

  The speech is actually one of Lincoln’s more thoughtful meditations on the relationship between power and character. In the opening of his address, he surveyed the technological progress of the past decades. Lincoln gushed about the growth of the railroads—the “iron horse” that was “panting” impatiently across the country. He marveled at the communications revolution led by the telegraph—“the lightening” that “stands ready harnessed” to carry the news across the globe “in a trifle less than no time.” The modern world had showered Americans with material gifts: “cotton fabrics from Manchester and Lowell; flax-linen from Ireland; wool-cloth from [Spain;] silk from France; furs from the Arctic regions.” American dinner tables, Lincoln declared, were covered with “coffee and fruit from the tropics; salt from Turk’s Island; fish from New-foundland; tea from China, and spices from the Indies.”

  And yet, Lincoln believed, unchecked expansion threatened to undermine the American character. Lincoln mocked the hypocrisy of “conceited,” “arrogant,” land-hungry Democrats. They own “a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all the rest by right of wanting it, and intending to have it,” Lincoln said. Young America, he continued, displayed an uns
eemly “ ‘longing after’ territory,” sarcastically adding that its “desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom.” Douglas and the Democrats, he said, his words dripping with irony, were “very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land.” Lincoln did his best to highlight the perils of untrammeled territorial expansion. Economic growth, Lincoln believed, should be channeled toward assuring American freedom from the Old World. Instead, Lincoln worried, the Democrats’ hunger for land would reduce Americans to slaves of their own appetites.63

  On the most immediate foreign-policy issue in the 1860 campaign—the proposed annexation of Cuba—both Lincoln and Seward essentially walked in lockstep with their party. In 1859 the U.S. Senate had issued a report advocating the purchase of the Caribbean island. Seward had long coveted Cuba, and once argued that the island represented a natural extension of American territory. “Every rock and every grain of sand in that island,” he had declared, was “drifted and washed out from American soil by the floods of the Mississippi, and the other estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico.” Still, by the late 1850s, Seward opposed annexation. Lincoln, too, apparently counseled against absorbing the island. A September 1860 editorial in the Whig Illinois State Journal, which scholars believe may have been written by Lincoln, argues against annexation and needles Douglas and the Democrats for their designs on Cuba.64

  Foreign policy, however, was largely a sideshow to the overriding issue of the 1860 campaign: slavery and the possibility of Southern secession. Seward was experienced and well traveled, and his high profile made him an apparent shoo-in for the Republican nomination. Lincoln recognized his long odds. “Everybody knows them,” Lincoln remarked of Seward and his other competition. “Nobody, scarcely, outside of Illinois, knows me.” Seward could also boast the backing of Thurlow Weed, one of the country’s shrewdest and most ruthless political operatives. Lincoln boosters counseled the Illinois lawyer to imitate his opponent. “Do like Seward does,” Chicago mayor John Wentworth advised Lincoln in the spring of 1860. “Get someone to run you.”65

  In late May, Republicans gathered in Chicago at the “Wigwam”—a makeshift hall on the corner of Lake and Market streets that had been built for the 1860 convention. It was, one reporter recalled, “a gorgeous pavilion aflame with color and all aflutter with pennants and streamers.” Delegates debated the prospective GOP platform, ultimately approving expansionist planks like support for a transcontinental railroad and laws that would encourage western migration. Meanwhile, Weed—whom Republicans referred to as Lord Thurlow or the Dictator—had arrived in Chicago on a thirteen-car train from New York, carrying $100,000 cash, accompanied by a posse of whisky-swilling pro-Seward operatives. He worked the delegations, amid the flags and red-white-and-blue bunting, with motions “as rapid as a rope-dancer’s.”66

  Weed tried to create an aura of inevitability around his man. But Seward had serious flaws as a candidate. As the debate over slavery had intensified, Seward predicted that the regional differences would erupt into an “irrepressible conflict”—a statement that unnerved some dovish voters. Lincoln’s campaign staff shrewdly used his opponent’s words against him. The Lincoln men whispered that Seward’s hard-line stance had rendered him unelectable. Lincoln’s team knew that Seward and Weed would be formidable opponents. They cleverly asked delegates to make Lincoln their “second choice.”

  Seward, meanwhile, ensconced himself at his vast estate in Auburn, New York—a twenty-room mansion set amid five acres of spectacular gardens and fruit trees. Huge crowds gathered on the lawn and spilled out into the street. “All right,” Seward’s men at the convention site had telegraphed their boss the day of the balloting, “everything indicates your nomination today sure.” Now, as voting began, a rider stationed at the local telegraph office galloped to the Seward estate and announced his enormous lead to the crowd. Seward, now fifty-nine, with a shaggy mop of gray hair, beamed confidently at his supporters. “I shall be nominated on the next ballot,” he declared, to a chorus of huzzahs.67

  As the voting began, Seward easily won the first ballot, with 173½ votes to Lincoln’s 102. Wild cheering broke out in Auburn when the horseman arrived with the tally. Seward, according to one witness, processed the news “without the movement of a muscle of his countenance.” Yet as the polling continued, ballots shifted away from marginal candidates with no chance of victory and into Lincoln’s column. Delegates seemed to be buying the line that Seward’s radical rhetoric would fatally hinder him in the border states during a general election. The pleas to convention-goers to make Lincoln their “second choice” was proving to be sound strategy.

  At the Wigwam, trying to maintain the momentum, Lincoln’s advance men whipped the crowd into a fury. “Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together,” wrote one newspaperman. “I thought the Seward yell could not be surpassed; but the Lincoln boys … made every plank and pillar in the building quiver.” Moments later, Seward’s team was forced to dictate a curt telegram and dispatch it to Auburn: “Lincoln nominated third ballot.” The color drained from Seward’s face. On the Wigwam floor, a reporter saw Thurlow Weed “press his fingers hard upon his eyelids to keep back the tears.” Seward himself later mused that it was lucky he had not kept a diary at the time of the vote, or his entries would have been full of “cursing and swearing.”68

  In Chicago, jubilant Lincoln supporters streamed out of the Wigwam, burning tar barrels, pounding drums, and firing cannon. Lincoln got the news at the local newspaper office in Springfield, where he had gone to wait for the results. “Well, gentlemen,” he said when his nomination was confirmed, “there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I am.” At the state capitol building in Springfield, cheering Lincoln supporters packed into a raucous rally in the rotunda. Church bells clanged, and a Mexican War–era cannon thundered. The Lincoln men eventually marched to the nominee’s house amid blaring music and fluttering banners. Late into the night, revelers burned bonfires and filled the sky with fireworks.69

  Seward was devastated. Months after the balloting, the New Yorker was still smarting from the defeat. “Disappointment!” he cried. “You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer!” Seward, when he cooled down, eventually agreed to campaign for Lincoln, speaking at whistle stops around the country. The New Yorker cut his usual melodramatic figure, dressing in “a strange and indescribable Syrian cashmere cloak,” according to Charles Francis Adams Jr., son of Lincoln’s future man in London. As the train rumbled across the country, Seward fortified himself with brandy and chain-smoked cigars. At one stop, in Toledo, Ohio, an inebriated Stephen Douglas stumbled into Seward’s car in the dead of night. Waving a whisky bottle, he demanded that Seward come out and make a speech. Seward refused and went back to bed.70

  Toward the end of the campaign, in October 1860, Seward’s train made a quick stop in Springfield. Lincoln briefly boarded Seward’s car, but the former opponents treated each other coolly. One newspaperman reported that the two men acted “as if each was afraid of his own virtue in the presence of the other.” Another observer wrote that Lincoln’s demeanor “was marked rather by deference and respect than cordiality.” Lincoln, recalled a third witness to the meeting, appeared shy and stiff, “as if he felt out of place.” Seward seemed no more comfortable. The entire whistle stop took all of fifteen minutes. Then the wounded New Yorker was gone again.71

  Lincoln’s opponents, meanwhile, did their best to remind voters of his stance on the Mexican War. “Mr. Speaker!” went one Democratic chant. “Where’s the spot? Is it in Spain or is it not? Mr. Speaker! Spot! Spot! Spot!” The heckling seemed to have some effect. “Will you be kind enough,” a New York iron importer wrote Lincoln in October 1860, “to say if you did or did not whi
le you were in Congress vote against supplies to the American army while on the battlefields of Mexico?” Lincoln swiftly wrote back to refute the accusation, adding that it would be “a matter of record in the Journals and Congressional Globe” if he had. “No man making that, or any such charge, should be listened to,” Lincoln scolded his correspondent.72

  The 1860 campaign also featured a fierce battle for the loyalty of foreign-born voters. For years, refugees from Europe—a handful of whom had fled the tumult of the liberal revolutions and conservative counterrevolts of 1848—had been streaming into the American Northwest, where voting laws made it relatively easy for newcomers to gain the franchise. German immigrants, in particular, tended to be intensely politically active. They flocked to crowded rallies to hear native speakers like Carl Schurz, a Lincoln supporter from Wisconsin who loudly advocated for voting rights and western land grants. Schurz boasted that his acolytes consisted of a “solid column of German and Scandinavian antislavery men, who know how to handle a gun and who will fight, too.” Actually, German voters were far less homogeneous than Schurz claimed; many Catholic Germans, for example, remained wary of the xenophobic nativism of some Republicans. Nevertheless, Schurz founded a “foreign department” of the Republican national committee and sent speakers fanning out across the heartland.73

  Lincoln, a long-standing supporter of immigrant rights, did his best to court the increasingly powerful constituency. He forcefully rejected the nativism of many of his fellow former Whigs. (Billy Herndon, for example, had been known to exclaim, “God damn the Irish!” Even Mary Lincoln had once written of “the necessity of keeping foreigners within bounds,” complaining of the “wild Irish.”)

  Lincoln worried that if anti-immigrant sentiment got much worse, Americans would soon have to change the Declaration of Independence to read, “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” In that event, Lincoln lamented, “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.” As the 1860 campaign approached, he wrote a letter to a German-American supporter observing that “I have some little notoriety for commiserating [with] the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.”74